


mouth by mouth the legends are made

by keysmash



Category: Stargate: Atlantis
Genre: Fix-It, Gen, Legends, Missing Scene, Pregnancy, Time Travel, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-20
Updated: 2010-06-20
Packaged: 2017-10-10 05:18:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/95997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/keysmash/pseuds/keysmash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The earliest developments reached Michael in a timely manner, though he heard them all in different places.</p>
            </blockquote>





	mouth by mouth the legends are made

**Author's Note:**

> This is a missing scene from 420, The Last Man, and is accordingly full of spoilers. Beta by [](http://ceitie.livejournal.com/profile)[**ceitie**](http://ceitie.livejournal.com/).

News traveled on as always, leaping from planet to planet as traders stepped from gate to gate. The earliest developments reached Michael in a timely manner, though he heard them all in different places.

Sheppard's disappearance caught Michael at his favorite lab, deep underground in a labyrinth of caves. The news was patched together from several different sources, and though no one knew why or how, it was clear that Sheppard was gone. Michael brought the messenger to Teyla's quarters, to repeat the evidence. She turned from them in silence, but Michael studied the defeated slope of her shoulders, and left her, feeling fresh hope.

Then, word came that McKay and Dex had left Atlantis and begun training fighters in combat, in explosives and weaponry, in code-breaking. Rumors abounded -- they were lovers; they were rivals for Teyla's affections; they had threatened to destroy the city unless they received help; they had been banished. No one knew with any certainty whether they had abandoned Atlantis, or whether she gave her blessing to the work. Michael assumed the latter after his third costly escape from operatives in sleek, black uniforms and worn, sturdy homespun, all fighting perfectly in tandem. He pulled further and further back to find safety, and news trickled to him slower than before: with her son gone, Atlantis finally turned all of her resources to finding her lost daughter. They must have learned what Michael knew, that the child was the key to everything. Michael eventually hid Teyla away in his most secure plant, surrounded by his best guards and a single, loyal midwife.

It was months later, when Michael and his remaining lieutenants slept on a different planet each night, that he finally heard of her escape. Teyla had walked out of his complex in bright daylight, with her head high and her newborn tied to her chest. She met Dex and McKay's strike force near the planet's gate, half a day's trek away. The team who blew the lab found it littered with dead guards, a trail of blood unbroken from her cell to the door.

The legends had already begun to grow around Teyla, when Michael first heard the tale. She'd hypnotized all his men, and they killed themselves, at her bidding. She'd been weaponless, but her son had been born holding a sword, and then she fought. An Ancestor came to her in a dream, and gave her strength and hope. A storm had blown in on her behalf; she made a knife out of the bones in her meals; she awoke one day to find everyone dead; she was simply the greatest fighter of the age. Michael suspected he had underestimated her, both her power and her desperation, but he did not correct the villagers who told him the stories.

A great time passed, then, before Michael heard more news, but he no longer needed the rumors and gossip. Events were evident. He was pursued endlessly, from all fronts. His status as mutual enemy led Wraith and humans to form alliance after shaky, short-lived alliance against him, and he fled where he could. The entire galaxy was at his back, and he was alone.

Michael didn't remember the exact address for the Estraln's planet, but he stumbled across it in the end. He disabled the gate after he came through, and then hid himself in the woods. The Estraln lived far from the bright center of the galaxy, but they studied the stars regardless. They worked with little technology, wanting no artificial lights to distract from the ones above, and they were rarely culled. Even now, they stayed largely untouched by the sweeping war. Michael settled outside a large town, and slowly inserted himself into the background as a hermit.

He ate what food he could find, or grow. He hunted in season, and out of it, and wore deep hoods, to keep his well-known face always in shadow. The local children dared each other to peek at the small house he built. He watched the girls turn to women; occasionally, he sent dreams to them, of the ways he wanted to possess their bodies under the stars, in his dark bed. Some of them stared contemplatively into the woods afterwards, but none ever came to him.

For an endless time, season following season, Michael waited. He nurtured his loss, his wrath, and so was not entirely alone. He plotted his revenge as best he could, knowing nothing of the situation, and he waited. He lay in wait.

When his face grew lines to match his white hair, Michael went to his first planting festival. It began at night, as did most Estraln rituals, and in the darkness, Michael walked unnoticed. He drank cool, sweet wine while part of a crowd, and learned the songs sung of his past.

The powers of the former age, human and Wraith, all rose and fell rapidly in the vacuum created by his disappearance. It seemed that each side suffered great losses, but the fighting gradually slipped back to near its original levels. Hive-skirmishes and cullings still occurred; humans still fought back, or ran, and always, they spread the word.

The greatest change of all seemed to be in Atlantis. Michael learned with surprise that the secretive, stingy city he'd known had flung herself open to her neighbors at last. People Michael recognized as fools were sung as great leaders in battle, and as wise, if often impatient, teachers. The strangers in the galaxy had turned themselves into a center of learning, and a place of refuge. It was now possible to move to the city, for protection or for study.

Michael turned these facts over slowly. If the stories reached even the peaceful, isolated Estraln, surely Michael had waited long enough. It was time to act.

The gate had been repaired since he last stepped through it, as Michael expected it would be. He traveled to a bustling trade world and lost himself again, this time in the warren of bars around the main markets. He created a vague history of betrayal and torture in his past, to explain his scars and his lack of ties, and people accepted him as just another quiet patron.

Traders and wanderers told him the tales he wanted, for the price of a drink or a meal. Michael grew adept at finding the loneliest faces in the crowd, the ones who would talk or sing for no other cost than the hope of conversation.

He heard for the first time of Tagan Weir Sheppard Kanaan Emmagan, who had grown from a pale slip of a boy to a warrior worthy of five names, and was now beginning to distinguish himself as a statesman. The child had become the first of a people after all, the New Athosians who lived between tent and city. He wore the grooves on his face as badges of pride, as a testament to his mother's strength, and the songs called him the Hand of Death, one who culled the Wraith.

Michael listened to the tragedy of Sheppard, lost in a flash of light between worlds. He learned of Atlantis's communal project in regaining him, at aiming at a target 48,000 years away, and at never leaving a man behind.

Over all, he heard the city's self-assurance in her own strength. Michael thought back to his former bravado, which had only bred weakness, and he began to plan.

He stole enough money to buy a selection of holoteachers, reproductions of Atlantis's most celebrated minds. The McKay program was designed to teach him advanced physics, but Michael played with the controls until he found a hidden level -- programming. Then, McKay willingly led Michael through the steps he needed to take.

He erased the other personalities and gave all their memory to the McKay file. He pulled names from the songs and taught the holo a complicated story of failure and retreat. Michael authored his own victory with a grim smile -- his dreams of Atlantis sinking while he rose had remained clear throughout the years. Perhaps, now, they would come to pass. He gave the personality construct the coordinates of a booby-trapped lab, and specified a time shortly before he'd stashed Teyla away.

Sheppard would carry faulty intel into the past. The Atlantians would go running to save Teyla, and instead, would be destroyed.

The holoteacher rewrote Michael's code in simplistic elegance. Michael ignored the McKay program when it questioned the feasibility of the plan, claiming its human version would never be fooled by the logic gaps in the story. Michael knew the depths of desperation, though. They would bite thankfully at his bait; they would run to his trap.

He saved his program and did not use the holo again.

Michael traveled back to Atlantis with a group of refugees, seeking asylum. He did not expect to go undiscovered for long. Some of the fighters from the war still served in Atlantis, and Michael would never pass through medical or clerical processing undetected. He slipped away from his companions as soon as possible, and pried off a control panel in a dim corridor.

Michael's dummy program was clumsy and noticeable. He had written it himself, with no guidance from the McKay construct. It tried valiantly to sink the city, but the alarm klaxons didn't even have time to sound before troops descended on Michael. In the ensuing commotion, as Michael was hauled to the brig, and the city's past and present leaders notified of his presence, the McKay override slipped unnoticed into the Sheppard project's code. It merged with the personality saved for the future, and it removed all traces of the change.

Michael waited patiently in a glowing cell for what would come: a rapidly-performed sham trial, perhaps, then an execution, and a celebration jumping from gate to gate, across human civilization, and from hive to hive.

And then, 48,000 years later, and twenty years ago, he would receive his second chance.


End file.
